


ferrum solitariam

by handydandynotebook



Series: axecution [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Blood, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Disembowelment, Gore, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Masturbation, Other, Past Violence, Susan Hargrove Needs Help, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, inappropriate use of axes, is not a tag but i'll stake my claim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 07:53:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28988799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handydandynotebook/pseuds/handydandynotebook
Summary: When Susan struck bone it would crack. The meat would separate and she would not, could not stop there. Chopped through it until she hit the bone and she intrinsically knew it was bone even when she couldn’t see it. There was nothing else that could crack like that, those disgusting, hideous wet cracks.Her breath catches as they echo in her ears. She leans over the gun safe, bracing an elbow on top. The twitch between her legs is incessant. She rubs her fingers along the grip of the axe haft, a buzzing in skull.
Series: axecution [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2121561
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10





	ferrum solitariam

**Author's Note:**

> okay ig inappropriate uses of weaponry is my theme for this week ahgljdhgsfgwdyiefygew.
> 
> part 2 of axe murder snafu au. this wasn't supposed to be a series wtf.

Susan goes down to the basement with the intent to clean the axe. She descends the steps in the dead of night with the intent to scrub the blood from the blade. It’s been over a week. The longer she waits to clean, the worse it will be. The sooner she washes the blood away, the better. 

Susan opens the safe with the intent to wash the axe anew, rid every trace of what she’s done. But when the sharp, metallic reek assaults her nostrils, the bucket slips from her hands, bottle of Formula 409 rattling against the plastic and sponges tumbling free. The scent of blood is strong but stale, this musty undercurrent. 

Susan’s eyes fall to her pajamas, thin, lavender cotton tunic and matching short, loose fitting bottoms. It’s the oddest thing, how she’d forgotten they were there at all. So focused on the axe, the actual murder weapon, she didn’t even consider her bloodstained clothes. 

She should burn them. Of course she should burn them. Susan should take them upstairs right now and shove them in the fireplace. 

She puts them on instead. 

She isn’t sure how it happens. She doesn’t plan on taking off her clean, unsullied nightgown. She doesn’t plan on her lightweight robe tossed behind her. 

Susan looks down at herself, swallows as she stares at the splatters suddenly all down her front. Once soft cotton is stiff with dried blood, fabric harsh and scratchy against her skin. The smell is stronger. Susan can taste it now, stinging on her tongue, thick in the back of her throat.

She could taste it that night too. At one point it splattered right across her mouth, hot and fresh. She believes it was when she wrenched the axe out of Neil’s throat, that was maybe the fourth hit? The fifth? 

After the split in his eyeball but before the protrusion of his intestines. Susan shivers as the memory grabs hold and squeezes. God, he was still standing up until that point. Swaying, stumbling, but still upright. The stamina Neil had, she’s fortunate that his eyes went right to Billy bleeding on the floor, that he didn’t even seem to notice Susan until she buried the axe in his stomach. 

Thinking about it has her own insides twisting up, writhing inside her. She was so scared, couldn’t hesitate, absolutely couldn’t hesitate, hesitation would’ve been her own funeral. She knows this, she feels it in her eyeteeth now as much as she’d felt it that night, thrumming with cocaine and something else— something that shouldn’t have been her but couldn’t have been anything but. 

Susan picks up the axe. She runs shaky hands over the rusty brown encrusted handle as her heart skips a beat, heat flashing through her veins. Some of it flakes under her fingers. 

She couldn’t stop swinging. It wasn’t a matter of killing Neil, really, not at that point. It was a matter of surviving him and she couldn’t stop swinging at all. His blood splashed and drenched her like bathwater. 

Her husband’s meat sundered just like the raw, glossy chicken gizzards she chopped upon her cutting board. She could feel it under the axe, the give, the shearing, the slick suction of his wounds at her blade. Susan had always distantly known people were made of meat just as much as the cuts from the livestock she prepared in the kitchen. But to know it and to feel it were two completely different things. 

She shudders as she thinks about it, hairs prickling along her neck, a nervous, uncomfortable twitch between her legs.

When Susan struck bone it would crack. The meat would separate and she would not, could not stop there. Chopped through it until she hit the bone and she intrinsically knew it was bone even when she couldn’t see it. There was nothing else that could crack like that, those disgusting, hideous wet cracks. 

Her breath catches as they echo in her ears. She leans over the gun safe, bracing an elbow on top. The twitch between her legs is incessant. She rubs her fingers along the grip of the axe haft, a buzzing in skull. 

Susan can’t stop thinking about it. She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t want to kill Neil, she just had to make him stop. She didn’t know how else to make sure it would stop. And it had to stop, stop, stop because Max’s collarbone could’ve been her neck and— and when Neil broke it, the noise it made was probably just like the ones his bones made when Susan drove the axe into them, disgusting and hideous and horrible. 

Her eyes sting, she bites her lip against the tears. 

Susan had to stop Neil which meant she couldn’t stop swinging. It was as simple as that. Want had nothing to do with any of it. Desire had no part to play. 

It isn’t desire she’s feeling between her legs now, either. It’s not. It’s some kind of discomfort, something antsy, itchy. It needs to be soothed. 

She doesn’t know if she meant to hack the same spot she’d first struck him, square in the gut. Perhaps it was instinctual. There was already something protruding, slightly, some wet mass glistening under the dim diffuse of light from Max’s bedroom spilling into the hall. In retrospect, she thinks the second strike there was the blow that actually did him in. 

Susan doesn’t think about what she’s doing as she guides the knob of the haft up one leg of her loose, baggy bloodstained pajama shorts. Doesn’t think about what she’s doing as she rubs her folds against it. Doesn’t think of what she’s currently doing, only thinks of what she already did. 

The noise it made was even more revolting than the noises the bones did. When she wrenched the axe free that time, she felt the evisceration before she saw it, the sliding under the blade. Neil’s belly unzipped with a sound like moist ground round chucked at the wall. 

Susan spreads her legs wider. She pushes the knob past her entrance, gasps softly at the unprecedented sensation. Bizarrely she thinks _splinters,_ and then _no,_ the handle is lacquered. She pushes it up a little higher, cannot believe what she is doing but she’s just throbbing behind the stiff, bloodied pajama shorts. They are stifling, the heat is voracious and she needs release— 

Neil’s intestines released themselves from the lips of shorn fascia in a crimson shower. They hung down like smoked sausages at the deli, thick and slick and seeping. Neil crumpled to his knees and collapsed like Goliath struck with David’s stone. He was still twitching a bit as the carpet soaked beneath him and Susan kept swinging. 

She thrusts the knob of the axe up and down, rattled and alert, chest fluttering. Her breath quickens, coming out in nervous puffs. She’s still crying. The tears are salty when they trickle between her lips. 

One swing pierced the bowel. Unmistakably pierced the bowel, because then there was brown matter trickling into the blood and a foul, fecal smell wafted through the copper drenched air. Susan kept going, continued hacking into him.

She curls her free hand into a fist, sickened by the noises of her own wet folds squelching around the knob. It isn’t pleasurable at all. It’s awkward, hits the internal part of her clit but not the way she needs it too, she swears it’s bumping right into her pubic bone. 

Susan slashed his jaw again. Teeth bounced from rent gums and rolled into the ruin of his open throat. She aimed for the throat again too, even with his intestines unspooled and spewing filth, it hadn’t felt like Neil was dead. In retrospect Susan’s sure he was. Now as she cries quietly and rides the haft of her murder weapon, she’s positive he was done, but at the time it hadn’t felt like it at all. 

The blood widened around Neil’s form until it was this massive puddle nearly touching Susan’s toes but she was so scared, he simply didn’t feel dead. She didn’t think he’d truly feel dead until she beheaded him. It’s like Neil wasn’t a person but a monster of some kind, a vampire, it had to be exact, it had to be the most definitive of definitive or he would rise again and rip the axe right out of her hands. 

Susan had to cut off his head. In the eerie hours before dawn, wired with cocaine, bloody axe in her hands, it was the only thing that made sense. She thinks she would’ve gone through with it, if Max didn’t cry out, frazzled and strained. 

_“Mom! Stop! You can stop now, Neil’s dead!”_

Susan puffs and rocks herself into her thrusts. The knob goes deeper. It’s too hard, it hurts and the sensation of her stiff, ruined pajamas scratching over her sweaty, fiery skin makes her want to scream. The sounds of her own slickness are making her sick. 

_“Help me with Billy! He’s dying too!”_

And Susan didn’t help at all, she spooked. She spooked and she hit him, and there wasn’t supposed to be blood. She hit him with the butt, she didn’t expect there to be blood. And in retrospect, that was as stupid as thinking Neil must be decapitated to be certainly, verifiably dead. People can be bludgeoned to death with blunt objects as solid as the axe head. Sharp side or not, it simply wasn’t safe to hit anyone in the head with something that heavy, that rigid, that solid. She should’ve known better. 

She should’ve known better but she was so utterly, nakedly terrified she thought she may piss herself. She panicked and she moved with panic, then there was even more blood. Billy was already so bloodless under the light from Max’s bedroom— bloodless and quiet, so, so horribly quiet when anybody with another person’s hand jammed into their insides ought to be screaming their lungs out.

Susan chokes out a sob and thrusts the knob with a bruising force. She lifts her elbow from the safe and slips her hand past her waistband, rolling her thumb over her clit as she continues to pump it inside. Her fingers are damp and the smell of blood is fresher, richer in the air. 

She works the axe inside and nearly gags on the stench of it. Tips her head back and bites back a ragged sound somewhere between a sob and a moan. Heat flickers through her nerves as she clenches around the lacquered haft, pooling in her center. 

Susan’s stomach punts like a kickball when she finally reaches climax, clenching around the handle. It’s a wretched release wrought with an anxiety that only idles rather than dissolves when she slips the handle out from her bottoms and realizes how much of the dried, crusty blood smears are gone. She had intended to clean the axe, but not like this. Never like this, she needs to get out of these clothes. 

Susan feels shaky as she strips. Shoves her pajamas back in the safe. She sensibly puts her nightgown and robe back on. She could pick up her supplies and clean the axe properly. She returns it to the safe and slams the door shut instead, doesn't think she wants to look at anymore, maybe not for awhile. 

She trots to the door and nearly jumps to the moon when she pulls it open just to see Billy on the other side, about halfway up the steps. He seems just as startled, hand fluttering on the railing as he jerks back. His brows knit together, lips twitching in a small grimace. Guiltily, Susan suspects the action caused him pain. 

“What’re you doing down here?” she asks. 

“Could ask you the same thing.” 

“C-Cleaning,” Susan splutters. “I came down here to clean. Couldn’t sleep.” 

“Okay then…”

“And you?” she blinks rapidly, schools her face into an expression she hopes is neutral as she buries red tinted hands into her pockets. 

“I just want my coke back.” Billy squints at her. “Why did you take it anyway?” 

“Well...you really shouldn’t be using that stuff, Billy. It’s, um, not good for you.” 

“Don’t fool around with married MILFs, don’t do drugs,” Billy deadpans, rolling his eyes. “Look at you, dispensing all these valuable pearls of wisdom one after the other. Inspiring, truly, you’ve saved me from myself.” 

Susan sighs heavily, chews her lip. She doesn’t really know what to do about him, or with him, or for him. Billy's never listened to her. She supposes she’s never given him any reason to. 

“How did you even buy it?” she asks, swallowing softly. She knows he didn’t steal any money from Neil. She would’ve heard that, in more ways than one. 

“Eh, learn to give good enough head and people’ll get you anything.” 

Susan gapes, abjectly mortified. She feels her stomach drop and she’s trying to say something, admonish him to no avail or offer more suggestions he’ll just scoff at. None of it would do any good, so it’s just as well that none of it makes it’s way off her tongue. 

“Your face. Pfft, Sue, you’re such a prude.” Billy cracks a slow grin and chuckles, shaking his head. “Nah. Really, I just borrowed some other guy’s wallet.” 

“Are you telling me you stole a wallet?” Susan presses, more anxious than angry, truth be told. 

“Just some douche from school, pretty boy, smells like money, doubt he’ll miss it.” Billy grips the railing and shuffles down the rest of the stairs, stepping around Susan. 

Susan sighs and tucks her chin down as she heads upstairs, hands still in her pockets. 

**Author's Note:**

> i keep getting distracted by shorter more manageable concepts smh.


End file.
